Fact check: Trump falsely claims every poll says he won the debate

By Daniel Dale, CNN

Washington (CNN) — Former President Donald Trump has returned to a time-honored tradition of his: citing junk online polls to claim he was the clear winner of a presidential debate that scientific polls found he lost.

He did it in 2016 after his debates against Hillary Clinton. He did it in 2020 after he debated Joe Biden. And he did it again on Wednesday after facing off against Vice President Kamala Harris the previous night.

He wrote on social media on Wednesday afternoon: “Every Poll has us WINNING, in one case, 92-8, so why would I do a Rematch?”

“We won the debate according to every poll — every single poll, I think,” Trump told reporters later in the afternoon.

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. As of Thursday morning, every major scientific poll about the debate — every poll that used random sampling techniques to try to obtain a representative picture of US public opinion — had found that Harris won. The polls in which most respondents said Trump won were unscientific junk polls — open questions posted online — that allowed an unlimited number of people to click and respond no matter how old they are or what country they live in, making the results useless as a measure of US public opinion.

Here are the results of three scientific polls about the debate from established nonpartisan pollsters. The first two were released before Trump made his Wednesday claims that every poll showed him winning.

CNN poll conducted by SSRS (605 registered voters who said they watched): 63% said Harris did a better job in the debate, 37% said Trump did a better job.

YouGov poll (2,166 registered voters who said they watched): 54% said Harris won the debate, 31% said Trump won, 14% weren’t sure.

Leger poll for the New York Post (1,002 US adults who said they watched): 50% said Harris won the debate, 29% said Trump won, 21% said nobody won or that they didn’t know.

Scientific debate polls from a Democratic pollster and a Republican pollster also found Harris ahead.

So while scientific polls are certainly imperfect, it’s clear that Trump’s claim that he won the debate “according to every poll” is wrong.

Trump was citing junk polls

Trump indicated on social media on debate night and in a Fox News interview the next day that — as he has in the two previous presidential elections — he was citing junk polls as the basis for his claims that polls showed he was the clear debate winner.

Trump said on Fox that “every single poll last night had me winning like 90 to 10” and “we have one here: 92 to 7.” Here’s an example of one poll that had him winning by a massive margin like that: an unscientific web survey from Newsmax, a right-wing television station that invited viewers to go to its website and say who they thought won.

Such polls are used by media outlets and social media accounts to generate engagement among their audiences. That’s fine. But the polls’ uselessness as an accurate gauge of public opinion is obvious.

Newsmax fans were more likely to know this poll even existed than other people were. People could vote multiple times if they owned multiple web-connected devices. And people could vote even if they are a child or a foreign citizen living somewhere else in the world.

In the Fox interview, Trump also cited an 80-20 lead he said he had at one point in a C-SPAN poll. C-SPAN is a nonpartisan entity that broadcasts the proceedings of the federal government. But its poll, too, was a junk poll; C-SPAN simply posted an open question on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

Supporters of either candidate, no matter where in the world, could share the C-SPAN link with an unlimited number of like-minded people.

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